College Stabbing Suspect Researched Mass Killings, On Suicide Watch

Dylan Quick, 20, charged with April 9 stabbings that wounded at least 14 people on Lone Star Community College campus near Houston. (Credit: Harris County Sheriff’s Office)

HOUSTON (AP) — A man accused of stabbing more than a dozen people at a Houston-area college is on suicide watch and will stay in jail as he undergoes a psychological evaluation, his attorney said Thursday. A search warrant shows that Dylan Quick researched mass killings and fantasized about cannibalism.

Quick is being held without bond on three counts of aggravated assault for the attack at Lone Star Community College in Cypress that injured more than a dozen people.

“My job is to find out very tough answers to tough questions. Why did this happen? What made it occur? What’s going on with him?” defense attorney Jules Laird said after a brief court hearing Thursday.

“Not every question has an answer that satisfies you or that says this is the root cause of why he did this … with a knife. We are going to see if we can reach that,” Laird said.

Laird said he was still looking into Quick’s background, but that he didn’t think the 20-year-old had a history of mental illness or had taken any medication to treat such a condition.

Harris County authorities have said Quick told them he had been fantasizing for years about stabbing people.

“They’ve got a statement from him, but that’s not the whole story,” Laird said.

“There are other things that I need to find out about and then we will provide the whole story to the public so that they can understand what happened,” he said.

Quick had been set to make his first court appearance Thursday since Tuesday’s attack, but Laird waived the reading of the probable cause statement so his client would not have to be in court.

“We just didn’t want to have a media circus at this point in time,” Laird said.

Quick’s next court hearing is May 10.

Authorities allege Quick used a razor utility knife to slash at his victims on two floors of the college’s health science building. The attack injured 14 people, two critically. Only one person remained hospitalized Thursday, and that person was listed in good condition.

Laird said Quick had been home-schooled for most of his life and described him as a voracious reader who had thousands of books. He added that Quick had been enrolled at Lone Star in part so he could be around other people and “get some type of feel for what the rest of the world is like as opposed to just living at home … and being home-schooled by his mother.”

Laird said Quick’s parents hadn’t had any major problems with their son, though he did apparently go missing for a few days in January 2011.

Quick’s parents had contacted Texas EquuSearch, a private Houston-area group that searches for missing people, after getting a text message from their son saying “he was leaving because he might possibly harm himself,” said Frank Black, a case adviser with the organization.

Black said he and others with his group were set to begin a search for Quick when his parents contacted them three days after the initial report, saying they had found their son and he was safe.

Quick had apparently been staying on the Lone Star college campus and some security guards had given him food and a tent to sleep in, Black said.

Laird said Quick’s parents are devastated by the accusations made against their son.

Quick’s mother is “the person that knows him more than anybody else in the world. And so, what she knows of him does not fit with what happened (Tuesday). She loves him dearly and his dad loves him dearly. And both of them do not understand what happened,” he said.

Neighbors and officials at the school also have been at a loss to explain the allegations made against Quick. They have described him as friendly but also withdrawn.